Monday, August 27, 2012

ON THIN ICE (OR THE ICEMAN ISN’T GOING TO COMETH)

FireandIce

Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.

Robert Frost

***

WAR MAY NOT DO US IN.

IT MAY BE DROUGHTS AND FLOODS.

And Scarcity of food and water.

THE FIRE
NEXT TIME MIGHT BE CAUSED BY MEN…

NOT BY
NATURE.

Nature seems to have other plans; or rather humanity
has made its plans for Nature.

But it wasn’t really planned.

We just like all of our toys and machines SO
much.

(And money made from petroleum.)

Humans
have “created” potentially catastrophic climate change on the planet.

There are probably other factors, but
hydrocarbons seem to be the chief culprit.

THE OTHER DAY I WAS IN A HEALTH FOOD STORE,
LOOKING FOR A CERTAIN HERB, WHEN THIS MAN BLURTED OUT IN A SOMEWHAT AGGRESSIVE
TONE,

“Everything has hydrocarbons!My
doctor told me that everything we eat is 90% hydrocarbons!”

I coughed, then thought of saying to him, “Yes, and most of those hydrocarbons are
because of us”, but I didn’t, fearful that this agitated man might throw
some of his hydrocarbons at me.

Yep, those ubiquitous hydrocarbons are walking
all over us.

Or rather, they’re spewing out of our power
plants, factories, cars etc.

Cough, cough, cough…

IT’S
ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

Sea Ice in Arctic Measured at Record Low

Nick Cobbing

An icebreaker, belonging to the environmental group Greenpeace, in the Arctic in 2011.

Published: August 27, 2012

The amount of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen to the lowest level on
record, a confirmation of the drastic warming in the region and a likely
harbinger of larger changes to come.

Satellites tracking the extent of the sea ice found over the weekend
that it covered about 1.58 million square miles, or less than 30 percent
of the Arctic Ocean’s surface, scientists said. That is only slightly
below the previous record low, set in 2007, but with weeks still to go
in the summer melting season, it is clear that the record will be beaten
by a wide margin.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center, a government-sponsored research
agency in Boulder, Colo., announced the findings on Monday in
collaboration with NASA. The agency bases its numbers on a slightly
conservative five-day moving average of sea ice extent.

The amount of sea ice in summer has declined more than 40 percent since
satellite tracking began in the late 1970s, a trend that most scientists
believe is primarily a consequence of human activity.

“It’s hard even for people like me to believe, to see that climate change
is actually doing what our worst fears dictated,” said Jennifer A.
Francis, a Rutgers University scientist who studies the effect of sea
ice on weather patterns. “It’s starting to give me chills, to tell you
the truth.”

Scientific forecasts based on computer modeling have long suggested that
a time will come when the Arctic will be completely free of ice in the
summer, perhaps by the middle of the century. This year’s prodigious
melting is lending credibility to more pessimistic analyses that it may
come much sooner, perhaps by the end of the decade.

“It’s an example of how uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to
climate-change risk,” said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at
Pennsylvania State University. “In this case, the models were almost
certainly too conservative in the changes they were projecting, probably
because of important missing physics.”

Experts say that a large storm in the Arctic this summer may have
contributed to setting the record. But it would not have happened, they
say, if the ice had not been steadily contracting for the last several
decades.

By itself, the melting of sea ice does not raise global sea levels,
because the floating ice is already displacing its weight in seawater.
But the sharp warming that is causing the sea ice to melt also threatens
land ice, notably the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting at what
appears to be an accelerating pace, and melting land ice does raise sea
levels. The Greenland sheet contains enough water to raise the sea level
by more than 20 feet around the world, though a complete collapse of
the sheet would probably take centuries.

Already, the reduction in sea ice is altering weather patterns in the
Arctic region, and perhaps beyond. It is stressing the ecology of the
region and causing rapid erosion of shorelines that are now exposed to
more vigorous waves.

The melting does, however, offer some potential benefits, including new
shipping routes and easier access to oil and other mineral deposits. A rush is under way to stake claims and begin mineral exploration in the Arctic.

The average temperature of the region is rising more than twice as fast as that of the earth as a whole, confirming a prediction
first made in 1896: that increasing levels of carbon dioxide from the
burning of fossil fuels would have an especially large impact in the
Arctic. One reason is that the white surface of the ice reflects a great
deal of the sunlight that strikes it back into space, but the darker
water and land exposed when the ice melts absorbs more heat from the
sun, which in turns leads to additional melting, more sunlight
absorption and so on — a feedback loop that scientists call Arctic
amplification.

Dr. Francis is one of a small group of climate scientists who argue
that the decline of sea ice is already having consequences for weather
in the Northern Hemisphere’s middle latitudes, including the United
States. She has published research suggesting that air circulation
patterns are being altered in a way that favors more extremes, like heat
waves and droughts.

Such ideas are not considered proven, but they are getting more
attention as the weather careens from one extreme to another.

Every year, the surface of the Arctic Ocean freezes during the long,
dark winter, with the extent of sea ice usually peaking in March. Until
recent decades, the ice was so thick by that time of year that a high
proportion of it would survive the summer. But scientists say the
warming trend has now reduced the ice to just a shell in many places,
and it melts easily in the round-the-clock sunshine that strikes the
highest latitudes in summer. The ice cover usually hits its minimum in
late September.

“The ice is thin, it’s broken up — kind of a loose pack,” Dr. Francis
said. “It’s not the thick, continuous ice cover that we used to know.”